Agony
Sorry this is only Seth Godin-esk in length but I’ve got to tell the masses immediately.
The worst thing about being an aspiring non-coding tech entrepreneur is the inability to help pre-launch. Sure, there’s customer development, setting up beta testing, keeping up with social media, etc. — but sitting around waiting for your MVP to be done is agonizing. Every day that passes is a day your competition gains traction because you (and your cooler/better product) aren’t there win the market.
Advice: If you’re an aspiring tech entrepreneur that isn’t too old of a dog yet (it’s hard to teach them new tricks), learn how to code in your spare time. It will open countless doors for you…or so it seems from my point of view.
Maybe the grass is always greener…what do I know anyways?
—edit—
Just making sure everyone knows, MVP stands for minimum viable product not most valuable player here.
There are many things you can be doing to get a better understanding of your prospects problems and operating reality. If you had the product today you would still need presentations and messaging of different lengths, qualifying questions, strategies for reaching prospects, etc…
You can normally develop an MVP that runs on that most reliable of demo platforms: PowerPoint. Use that to determine interest, feature content, prospect’s perception of value. If you can’t fit a useful pitch and/or set of questions on a single piece of paper and buy ten prospects a cup of coffee or a meal to discuss it, you probably aren’t thinking hard enough.
Customer development proceeds in parallel with product development and informs it.